The 30 Greatest Achievements of 2016

By
Shelby Rogers

December, 24th 2016

Most people reflect on 2016 with disdain, as the year seemed marred by tragedy after tragedy. However, 2016 saw a massive wealth of awesomeness. Leave it to science and engineering to keep pursuing incredible feats.

We compiled our 30 favorite engineering and science moments from 2016. In no particular order, here's the list:

Cellular cannibalism and nanotechnology took home international prestige at this year's Nobel Prize ceremony. The study of autophagy, or how cells eat themselves, could play a role in understanding how we survive. Nanogears might be the future of surgical devices.

Otto partnered with Budweiser to make the first delivery via autonomous semi: a beer run. However, Otto wasn't the only one making headlines this year. One company claimed its autonomous vehicle could be built in a matter of hours.

Since Proxima b's discovery, engineers and space officials have been in a race to see who can get to it first. With new discoveries come new mysteries. The biggest one? Whether or not this new planet could sustain life.

When a paper testing this theoretical drive got leaked online, physicists across the internet lost their minds. The EM Drive would defy Newtonian laws of physics by not having an equal and opposite reaction.

China's beastly TaihuLight trumped all other supercomputers with its impressive speed and 10.7 million cores. However, Japan recently announced plans to take on the TaihuLight. Could 2017 be the year we see Japan beat out China's top two supercomputers?

An entirely new state of matter has been detected in a two-dimensional material. The state is known as quantum spin liquid and it causes electrons to break into pieces. This new state of matter is mysterious because it was previously thought that electrons were indivisible building blocks of nature.

SpaceX just made history by successfully landing its Falcon 9 rocket onto its unmanned drone ship named, “Of Course I Still Love You.” The rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Florida at 4:43 P.M. on April 8, 2016.

Despite Donald Trump and his cabinet of climate change skeptics, the rest of the globe made several bold plans to drastically reduce carbon emissions. From the Paris Agreement in the spring to the more recent UN climate change meetings, world leaders have shown they're willing to put aside politics and plan for the future. We can only hope 2017 and beyond sees them follow through on these plans.

Google recently announced they'd be going for 0 carbon emissions and 100 percent renewable energy as a company. If they used any non-renewable energy, they would counterbalance that amount with renewable clean energies.

Several projects caught our attention this year for bringing us leaps closer to sustaining unlimited clean energy via nuclear fusion. Most recently, a team at South Korea's reactor managed to sustain high-performance plasma at high heat for the longest time to date. There's still much left to be done before any nuclear facility gets close to sustaining the full reaction. However, there's always next year.

What list would be complete without Tesla and its constant quest for the holy grail of automotive innovation? Tesla's autonomous vehicles seem to set the universal standard for other companies, and Elon Musk is no stranger to pushing limits. We can't wait to see what next year holds for both Telsa and self-driving vehicles.

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